Evergreen Energy Inc. is still looking at building a new plant in northeast Wyoming that will use the clean-coal technology it had been perfecting at an idled experimental coal refinery near Gillette, the company's chief executive officer said.
"It makes a tremendous amount of sense," Evergreen CEO Kevin Collins told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Tuesday from Phoenix. "We are still very connected to Wyoming."
About 50 people at Evergreen's Fort Union coal refinery lost their jobs last week when the company decided to focus on building a new and improved plant elsewhere. The Denver-based company is keeping about three dozen workers there to maintain the plant and keep it available for any future testing of its patented K-Fuel technology.
The technology reduces the moisture content in low-grade coal to boost its heat value and cut pollution when it is burned.
Evergreen built the $109 million Gillette plant to test whether the K-Fuel process could work on a large scale. The company said it's now ready to build a new plant that incorporates what it has learned from tinkering with the Fort Union facility.
A proposed 1.5 million-ton-per-year coal refinery on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan is the closest to being built, he said. That project is being undertaken with investment from Sumitomo Corp. of Japan.
Collins said Evergreen is also studying the option of building other plants in the United States.
"We're going to have to build multiple plants in a number of different areas," he said. "And if we could get a plant built in Wyoming first that would be great. If it doesn't become first, then I think there's always that opportunity to build a plant in Wyoming if we do want to do that."
He said Evergreen has been working on obtaining permits to build a plant in the Powder River Basin in northeast Wyoming for about the last 14 months. The company has not begun any permit work in other states, he said.
Collins said a key factor in locating new plants will be good access to multiple forms of transportation, multiple customers and multiple types of coal.
Moving massive amounts of coal in northeast Wyoming is mainly limited to trains. Collins said areas of the Midwest offer river barges and trucks as alternate transportation, giving the company more leeway with both moving the coal and price competition among shippers.
Building a plant in Wyoming "depends on how quickly we can work with the railroads in terms of coming up with reasonable transportation rates," Collins said.
"If there's other locations as we move down the road, we would still think it was a very viable concept to build a plant in the PRB in Wyoming," he said.
The K-Fuel process reduces the moisture content of low-grade coals such as lignite and sub-bituminous from roughly 30 percent to 7.5 percent and boosts the heat value from 8,000 British thermal units per pound to as much as 11,000 BTU, the company has said.
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